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  1. Home
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  3. Bengal: The British Bridgehead
  • Cited by 39
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1988
Online ISBN:
9781139055659
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521253307
Subjects:
Area Studies, South Asian History, Asian Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies
Series:
The New Cambridge History of India
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

The aim of Bengal: The British Bridgehead is to explain how, in the eighteenth century, Britain established her rule in eastern India, the first part of the subcontinent to be incorporated into the British Empire. Though the British were not in firm control of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa until 1765, to illustrate the circumstances in which they gained power and elucidate the Indian inheritance that so powerfully shaped the early years of their rule, professor Marshall begins his analysis around 1740 with the reign of Alivardi Khan, the last effective Mughal ruler of eastern India. He then explores the social, cultural and economic changes that followed the imposition of foreign rule and seeks to assess the consequences for the peoples of the region; emphasis is given throughout as much to continuities rooted deep in the history of Bengal as to the more obvious effects of British domination. The volume closes in the 1820s when, with British rule firmly established, a new pattern of cultural and economic relations was developing between Britain and eastern India.

Reviews

"The entire Cambridge series, judging from the quality of these two examples, will prove essential reading for some time to come, for both specialists in Indian history and scholars in related fields. Both authors have clearly demonstrated their control over the state of scholarship in their respective areas. These two authors, and the series editors as well, are to be commended for a fine start to what should prove to be a major contribution to the study of Indian history." Michael H. Fisher, Public Affairs Spring 1989

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - The setting for empire
    pp 1-47
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Early in the eighteenth century, the areas which now make up three states of contemporary India, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, together with present-day Bangladesh, were loosely welded together under a single Governor to form the eastern wing of the Mughal empire. In 1765, authority over the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa was formally transferred to the East India Company and by the 1820s these provinces had become the eastern wing of a vast new British empire in India. This chapter is concerned with agriculture and with the people who cultivated the land and made the payments on which the revenue-collecting hierarchy and the empires of the Mughals and the British ultimately depended. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was thought that 'the great body of the Bengal farmers' had been reduced to the state of being 'servants' of grain dealers. Bengal had become the most important area in Asia for the East India Company's trade.
  • 2 - Late Mughal Bengal
    pp 48-69
  • View abstract

    Summary

    When Alivardi Khan became Governor of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1740, these areas were still provinces of the Mughal empire. The links binding the three provinces to the imperial centre, had become very tenuous. An independent state was in the making. This chapter explores the kind of state that state might eventually have emerged in eastern India. The three provinces had acquired an administrative system that was almost entirely separate from that of the rest of the empire. The taxation levied from Bengal was one of the major props of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal government employed intermediary collectors to handle the payments from this multitude of small zamindars. Cataclysmic interpretations of the fall of Mughal Bengal along the lines of the breakdown of its government or some powerful upsurge of Hindu disaffection do not seem to have much foundation. The regime was not a dynamic one and it had not put down deep roots.
  • 3 - The crisis of empire, 1740–65
    pp 70-92
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Alivardi Khan's successful usurpation of the throne of Bengal encouraged others to try to establish claims to Bengal's wealth. By the 1750s Alivardi Khan appeared to have come through his tribulations successfully. From 1751 the resources of Orissa were handed over as part of the settlement with the Marathas, although the Nawabs of Bengal continued to nominate the Naibs of Orissa until 1760, when the first Maratha Subedar was appointed as Governor. The quarrel was over British commercial penetration far into the interior of Bengal. In 1757 Mir Jafar had been compelled to concede total freedom of movement for the Company's trade all over Bengal. With the grant of the Diwani, the provinces of the Nawabs of Bengal came not merely under the dominance of the East India Company, but under full British rule. The Marathas and the Mughals had been followed by the British. The Nawabs were swept aside as Calcutta conquered Bengal.
  • 4 - The new regime
    pp 93-136
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The establishment of British predominance in eastern India was a gradual and protracted process, beginning before 1757. This chapter discusses many different aspects of the British presence in Bengal during the first sixty years of colonial rule. In theory the settlement of 1765 had not established a British Bengal. The Nawabs would still be Nazims, holding court at Murshidabad, from where they would direct the defence of the provinces and the ordering of their internal peace and justice. The dispersal of the Nawab's army had eliminated the main rival to the East India Company's military supremacy. Warren Hastings, Governor, and the first Governor General from 1772 to 1785, embodied the mingling of old practices and new ideals. The period down to 1828 had seen the creation of a largely autonomous British-Indian state that was rather loosely connected with imperial Britain and pursued its own purposes of 'safety' and consolidation.
  • 5 - A new society?
    pp 137-179
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Contemporary British opinion believed that the establishment of a powerful and enduring regime that was capable of imposing order on its subjects was in itself an important agent of change. The peasant could now till his land and the artisan pursue his craft with a security that was entirely new. British administration, however, felt itself unable to conduct detailed 'scientific' surveys and to make minute inquiries into the capacity of cultivators to pay. In the early years of British rule, the most striking shifts in the social contours of Bengal took place in the high hills. Within a few years it was generally conceded that the East India Company's measures aimed at protecting the interests of ryots had been ineffective. With the arrival of Lord William Bentinck as Governor General in 1828, there seemed to be a western intellectual in authority who was willing to engage in dialogue with the more accessible intellectuals among his subjects.
  • 6 - Conclusion
    pp 180-182
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The intellectual ferment in early nineteenth-century Calcutta was one of the changes most attributable to colonial rule. Colonial rule brought fundamental change in the way in which the provinces were ruled. The new regime depended on the services of a huge number of its own subjects: soldiers, police, office staffs and a multitude of revenue payers. The East India Company's authority was to be supreme, and those from whom the Nawabs had been unable to wrest power or to whom they had chosen to delegate it were to lose it now. While employment under the British trade has been created in some areas, imports were beginning to threaten the livelihood of the most vulnerable artisans, those who spun and wove the higher quality cotton cloth. Establishing an empire in eastern India proved to be relatively easy; introducing more than superficial change into eastern India was another matter.
  • Bibliographical Essay
    pp 183-188
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter presents information on eastern India under the Nawabs 1740-65, and eastern India under the British 1765-1828. Some of the major contemporary histories and chronicles have been translated from Persian into English. The most famous is a translation of the Seir Mutaqherin of Ghulam Husain Khan, which first appeared in Calcutta in three volumes in 1789 and has been much reprinted. Other translations are: Riyaz us Salati, Tarikh-i-Bangala-i-Mahabatjangi, and the selection in Bengal Nawabs. The major collections of eastern India under the British, ordered to be printed before 1801 are reproduced in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, papers relating to India were extensively printed in virtually every year's Parliamentary Papers. Biographies of the famous Governors, Clive and Warren Hastings, appear regularly. The East India Company's early revenue experiments, the enacting of the Permanent Settlement and assessments of its consequences have provoked a huge literature.
References

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